sonalkhullarIF-Rockerz

You tried getting in touch with Helen, but failed. Was she averse to the idea of someone telling her story?

I
suspect that Helen has probably had enough of people asking her inane
questions about her life and times. If you think about it, there have
been four films made on her.

The first was James Ivory's Helen: Queen of the Nautch Girls, whose title itself seems exotic at this remove.

Then there was Helen: Always in Step
by Nasreen Munni Kabir, in which she was interviewed by Khalid Mohamed
and it is clear that she did not enjoy playing herself in front of the
camera, even though she comes across as warm and charming and
unaffected.

The third, Desperately Seeking Helen
by the young Canadian filmmaker Eisha Marjara seemed to me to be a way
of looking at the way in which Helen defined femininity as against the
way Marjara's mother tackled the problems of being an immigrant.

The
fourth was Anuj Vaidya's video documentary, which, again, used the
legend of Helen to explore the marginality of the gay man. She did not
participate in the last two films.

Quite
possibly, she simply did not feel that she had much to say. Or perhaps
she simply did not know who I was, where I was coming from and how I
was going to write about her. So, in the end, I gave up, but not
without a heartfelt sigh…

Helen
often served as a ready stereotype. She was usually present to depict
the immorality of a Western or, more often than not, a Christian woman.
Is that what attracted you to her story? Could you connect with that
story at any level?

Lily
(or more often Lilly), Rosie, Kitty, Suzie…they were the good time
girls, the ones who smoked cigarettes, danced in clubs, had a good time
and paid for it by dying in the end.

As
a Roman Catholic boy who watched Hindi cinema, I think I could always
see that Catholics of any description were seen as outsiders in
commercial Hindi cinema.

In
the book, I argue that this was simply a question of who went to see
Hindi cinema and who didn't. While Bollywood was willing to make
secular gestures by representing Muslims as positive characters, Parsis
and Catholics could easily be caricatured because they were
'Westernised' -- they did not watch Hindi cinema. In that sense,
therefore, yes, I felt that I was an outsider who was looking at
another outsider.

Considering
this is a look at a career spanning little over 30 years, your book is
extremely well-researched. What was the hardest part -- collating all
that data or trying to give it shape?

That
is a perceptive question. The fun part was watching the movies. The
difficult part was reading some 200,000 words of notes and trying to
figure out what should stay and what should go. Should one mention the
purple eye shadow and the green tights? And what about that wonderful
boy band in the Beatle wigs in the background? Should one analyse the
lyrics or should one describe the movements?

How
does one sum up in a paragraph the huge baggy grab-all narrative so as
to contextualise Helen? That was what took the greater part of the
three years that went into the book.

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